miserable Greyhound Bus experience - Wednesday May 15 2002

setting: Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York

My chosen method for traveling to Virginia today was via Greyhound bus. I suppose I could have taken the train, but trains do not run as regularly as buses in the long rural leg between Washington, DC and Staunton, Virginia.

The first leg of the trip was actually on a Peter Pan bus. The difference in quality between a Peter Pan and a Greyhound busride should be readily apparent even to the busriding neophyte. Peter Pan buses are operated more like airplanes than buses, and they come complete with a movie. On this ride, we actually got to see two movies. But there was also an agreeably folksy autonomy to this ride, with our bus driver introducing himself at the beginning of the trip and asking us all how we were doing. When, predictably enough, no one said anything, he cupped his hand to his ear and asked again. After he was through making introductions he assured us "I'm the best there is." Later in the trip he said, "I told you I'm the best there is. I scare myself sometimes."

I don't think I'd been in the the Washington DC Greyhound Station since back in the 1980s when the older, drug-free Bush was in office. Not much about it had changed during the 90s. The dining area had been slightly restructured, and I noticed that it was a strange hybrid of a Hardees and a Carl's Jr. It had the Carl's Jr. Star and menu, but the words "Carl's Jr" had been replaced with "Hardees." [On the web, I see that the California-based Carl's Jr. franchise has actually bought the Hardees franchise and is gradually supplanting its identity.]

The overall quality of service in the DC Greyhound Station seems to have actually managed to deteriorate from the dismal level it stood at back in the 1980s. For example, the glowing screens showing scheduled arrivals and departures had apparently crashed four hours ago and was showing stale information. Looking at them closer, I saw the screens included a blinking cursor and the familiar Windows Taskbar, indicating the system had been "upgraded" at some point in the past to a Microsoft "solution." Unfortunately, since this solution clearly wasn't functioning, I had to wait in line for about 20 minutes to learn my boarding gate from the solitary dude in the information kiosk.

I found myself sitting on one of a small cluster of iron bench seats and along came this older black gentleman asking the guy to my right if the seat between us was taken. The guy to my right indicated an older Asian gentleman (who had been drinking some canned beverage concealed in a tiny brown paper bag). The older black gentleman then quipped, "When I leave, I lose," as in, "You snooze, you lose." But later the Asian gentleman disappeared and the black gentleman was able to take his seat. From there, he and the guy beyond him struck up a conversation and it soon became clear that the clear substance in the plastic water bottle they were sharing was moonshine, not water. "It's the only way to make it that far," he said, alluding to the length of his bus ride. For my part, I was also discreetly drinking alcohol on the sly. I'd brought some vodka in my plastic coffee mug and had used it to take my Dr. Pepper to the next level.

As the time for my bus's departure came and went, it became increasingly clear that something was holding it up. Eventually one of the Greyhound gate employees came out and told the people in line that they were waiting for a replacement bus driver to show up and that we'd be going "in a few minutes." That was discouraging; everyone in line heaved a sigh indicating their knowledge that "a few minutes" really meant "indefinitely."

As "a few minutes" stretched out to first one hour and then part of another, the gate employees kept doing things to maintain our hopes and keep us from rioting. They'd open the boarding gate, shuffle around bus-side furniture, or ask to look at the ticket of the first person standing in line. Then everyone would clamber to their feet and prepare to board. But it was always a false alarm. With each raising and dashing of hopes the grumbling grew louder, and people could be heard saying they'd be launching formal complaints.

Finally we were allowed to board a bus, and everyone piled on. But then we were told we'd have to board a different bus because the bus we were on had a malfunctioning air conditioning system. But no sooner had we boarded the second bus than we were redirected back to the first because "the air conditioner had been fixed." My theory, which I explained to an older woman in an orange outfit, was that Greyhound still hadn't located a driver and we were being made to do mindless activities to keep us distracted.

But finally we did have a driver, although he looked like a corpse re-animated one last time to serve as an emergency substitute. He had (and no, I'm not making this up) fresh Frankenstein Monster stitches securing the top of his head and keeping his brains from falling out. What's more, he didn't know the route and kept getting lost along the way, particularly in the metastasizing suburbs of Northern Virginia. He kept making a wrong turn and then having to make a U-turn to double back.

I hadn't been through that part of the world in ten years, and as ugly as it was back in the 80s, it's much uglier now. Stark, low, rectangular brushed-metal buildings lurked behind antiseptic corporate logos, low artificial landforms and scrawny shrubbery. Every retail outlet and restaurant (including the many faux 50s-style diners) belonged to a recognizable national franchise. Even (nay, especially) the homes of the residents enthusiastically brandished their unwavering conformity to the least-unexpected possible archetype.

I will say this: whoever is working on fixing up the Pentagon is making amazingly rapid progress. The only evidence of the terrorist-installed hole is a looming crane, a framework of scaffolding, and an oddly-pink section of facade.

Greyhound had added a number of new stops since I'd last passed this way, including one at Dulles Airport. As late as we were running, I couldn't fathom what sort of hybrid transportational package would begin with an airplane flight and conclude in a Greyhound, but that's where we picked up several James Madison University students.

At one stop in Northern Virginia, this dark woman with a black head scarf got out of the bus and joined up with her waiting family, one of whom was dressed head-to-toe in a black burqa. I could overhear the black couple behind me discussing the matter, saying, "I thought she was white," and, "She wasn't wearing that scarf on the bus; she put it on just before she got out." Evidently Muslim women have decided traveling is considerably easier if they downplay the identifiable features of their faith.

Somewhere near Winchester, someone smoked a cigarette in the back of the bus. Though smoking on Greyhound buses is strictly forbidden, smoking enforcement is notoriously lax. Anyway, in an effort to cover the smell of this smoke, the guy behind me started spraying a big blue bottle of some sort of air freshener. There's something I've never really understood about air fresheners: when you use them, not only do you have to smell whatever it was you found disagreeable, but you have to smell the air freshener too. And it's a very rare air freshener that I find agreeable. Most of the time when I'm forced to inhale an air freshener fragrance, I have the feeling that I'm injuring my long-term health. This is especially true within the restricted confines of a Greyhound bus, where there's no possibility of escape. So I turned around and told the guy behind me, "You know, I don't really mind if you smoke, but please don't spray that shit; it's making me sick." The guy with the air freshener was a young scary-looking gangsta-type African American gentleman, and at first he was flummoxed by my protest. But after I went to sit down, he came up to my seat and said, in a low voice, "I ain't smoking and you better not be..." Well, about then I realized that a calm approach wasn't going to work. If he wasn't going to stop spraying that air freshener, I was determined to escalate. So I shouted, "Stop smoking and spraying that shit, you mother fucker!" That set him down in his seat, but then he rallied again and came up to my seat and leaned over me menacingly like he was going to kick my ass, telling me I better not this and I better not that. At this point the bus driver pulled the bus over on the side of the road. Realizing that now he was just delaying our already-late bus, the scary gangsta dude hollered up to the bus driver, "We's cool! We's cool!" And went to sit back down in his seat, telling me one final time, "Just don't talk to me again, not one word. If you do, Ima have to hit you." He left me alone for the remainder of the trip, and I ignored him, though I did hear him talking and chuckling about the altercation with his girlfriend, complete with impersonations of me saying "Stop spraying that shit" in an imitated white-man's voice. Meanwhile the guy sitting in front of me turned around to tell me I was a "damn foo" for "frontin'" like that. Later that guy went back to talk to the gangsta with the air freshener behind me and the altercation gave them a little conversation to bond over. I could overhear them saying, "Man, if he fronted like that back home, yo, we'da kicked his..." The meaning was clear but I can't really remember exactly the words they used, encoded as they were in the colorful metaphors of contemporary ebonics.

The worst navigational error of the trip happened in Harrisonburg, when the driver drove us to the wrong bus station on the south end of town. This meant we had to double back three exits north to get to the correct station before heading south again to Staunton. I was the only one to get off at the Staunton station, which these days is actually in Verona (just north of town).

It was 1:00am, meaning my bus had been two and a half hours late. I'd told my mother (Hoagie) when to expect me, and she and my brother Don had waited for me for hours and then given up. So when I called home, they suggested I get a taxi cab. Not finding the taxi cab number (though it was clearly posted in the window), I called home a second time, this time cajoling them with desperation. Eventually my mother drove out to get me in her second big pickup truck. While waiting for her, I took a bunch of digital photos through the windows of nearby stores. Verona is a particularly bleak and ugly strip village, and there wasn't a living soul in sight, but I was trying to make the most of my idle time.

Back home in my parents' kitchen, my arrival was greeted with great excitement. Everyone (including my father, brother, mother, and their nine-year-old black housecat "The Kitten") was hanging out and talking to me as I sipped beers and told lavishly-exaggerated stories about such things as my just-concluded bus ride, Iceland, and Paris. As usual, my brother and parents regaled me with mutually-exclusive topics near and dear to their respective hearts. For my mother, it's her new Arabian horse, now ill with a mysterious neurological condition. For my father, it's his botanical work, particularly his ongoing soil temperature studies. For my brother, it's all about prehistoric mammalian and dinosaurian life.

Baltimore.

Baltimore skyline.

Formerly-super-secret NSA headquarters along the Baltimore Washington Parkway. A parkway is just like a regular highway, but instead of being green, its signs are brown.

How to support a crack habit.

Waiting in line in the DC Greyhound Station.

Clocks didn't move this slow even back in my high school.

This guy had a beer concealed in a paper bag.

What a wacky guy.

Evidence of Hardee's partial-assimilation by the California burger franchise known as Carl's Jr.

Asian chicks waiting for their bus. That one on the end is a nun I think, and not Chinese.

Cigarettes and lottery equipment in Verona, Virginia.

Gas prices in Verona.

My parents.

My wacky brother, Don. His shirt reads, "London, Paris, Rome, Staunton."

The Kitten. She's nine years old yet still lives up to her name.